Open AccessBetween Mirrors all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body
Author(s) -
Marion May Campbell
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
lifewriting annual
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2635-2656
pISSN - 1559-2898
DOI - 10.16995/la.1913
Subject(s) - poetics , memoir , biography , queer , life writing , vitality , embodied cognition , literature , narrative , identity (music) , art , sociology , history , aesthetics , poetry , philosophy , gender studies , theology , epistemology
Just as any body's cells are constantly dying and regenerating, all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body draw its vitality from the teeming traffic of death, the fertile muck of the abject. Such is the suggestion of the title, sourced in Hélène Cixous' work (1991: 41), out of whose spell this life writing marks off its distinctive poetics of the fragment, drawing an ethics of openness from the mining of abjection. To be sure, this is no chronological memoir, building teleologically to a transformation and consolidation of social identity. Quite to the contrary: bold, brave, and disturbingly innovative, this work from Sydney-born Quinn Eades, formerly known as Karina Quinn, performs a body reinventing itself: scarified, 'surgeried', written into and out of, and endlessly reconfigured through the writing. Eades builds their story through a constellation of scenes staging the embodied, yet fractured self, the sujet en procès, the subject-on-trial and -in process (Kristeva 1977) from coruscating scintillation to depressive passivity, through what they call écriture matière -- writing as a material practice.